E-mu Emulator II Sampling Synthesizer

The Emulator II is a responsive, surprisingly easy-to-use musical instrument with staggering creative possibilities. It's also a sound effects designer's dream come true, a composer's personal orchestra, a recording studio's chance to have hundreds of acoustic and electronic instruments on call at any time, a university's research tool...but most of all, it provides the means for some truly special musical experiences. To give you a better idea of its capabilities, here are just some of the Emulator II's highlights.

Rather than synthesizing sounds, the Emulator II digitally records (samples) real-world sounds into its memory. If you want the Emulator II to sound like a piano, sample a piano; if you want it to sound like a barking dog, sample a dog.These sounds may then be modified with the Emulator II's analog synthesizer processors and/or state-of-the-art digital processors. The analog-type processors include:

The keyboard can play up to eight notes simultaneously. Like standard analog synthesizers, there is a complete set of modifiers for each note; so, when we refer to the filter or we are really talking about eight filters and VCA's.

Sounds are stored on commonly available double-sided, double-density (DS/DD) 5.25" floppy disks (as used with many personal computers). Thanks to sophisticated disk management techniques, it's easy to save, organize, retrieve, rename, and catalog various sounds. In fact, if the Emulator II was just a computer it would be pretty impressive: There's almost four times more RAM (memory) than a basic IBM PC, and the two disk drives store as much data as fourteen Commodore-64s!

For outside-world interfacing, the built-in eight-track sequencer (and the arpeggiator) can sync up to a 24, 48, or 96 pulses-per-quarter note click track, SMPTE time code, or MIDI; there's also a complete complement of MIDI functions, as well as an RS-422 port for control via external computer.

Despite all this flexibility the Emulator II is nonetheless not that hard to learn...as you will see during the course of this manual.

Several highly respected OEM and 3rd party sample libraries were developed for the Emulator II including a multitude of superb orchestral sounds. Many of the EIIs original library sounds were sampled from the more expensive Fairlight and Synclavier workstations (the Fairlight's famous "Sarrar/Arr1" choir sample is called "DigiVcs" in the Emu library). This can cause confusion when trying to determine which sampler hardware was actually used on a certain song.

Famous samples include the Shakuhachi flute used by Peter Gabriel in "Sledgehammer", and on Enigma MCMXC a.D. Also, the Marcato Strings heard on so many 80's records including Pet Shop Boys' "West End Girls". Rumour has it, every single sound on that track, with the obvious exception of the singers' voices, was made with an Emulator II (ref: Pet Shop Boys interview on "Synth Britannia" BBC4, 16 Oct 2009.) This is not undisputed as in the BBC Interview only the word "Emulator" (this might refer to the EIIs predecessor, the original Emulator) is mentioned unrelated to the song and the Emulator II became available only after the Single "West End Girls" was first released. The EII might have been used on the later rerelease of the single.

It was used for a number of film scores too such as the Terminator 2: Judgment Day score by Brad Fiedel, also used by Michael Kamen on a lot of his film scores such as Lethal Weapon and Highlander and John Carpenter used it for his films too in the 1980s. It even featured in the movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off, we see Ferris using the Emulator II to play sounds of coughing, then vomiting, in order to feign illness on the phone.

In the 2000s the Emulator II has risen in popularity due to the 80's pop culture resurgence and new artists wishing to revive the 80's Emulator-based sound. Prices for rare functioning units have gone up, and websites selling the original floppies have emerged.